Email or syslog notifications are common methods of communication on a network device. Syslog is a standard for logging program messages that allows separation of the software that generates email messages from the system that stores them and the software that reports and analyzes the messages. In general, a network administrator monitors the network and ought to be informed of the network status, or of situations where some event has occurred in the network or proxy itself. In a traditional network management tool or network information system, the administrator may receive these messages through a syslog protocol, which is a stream of text sent to the server that does something intelligent, e.g., the server sends the message out as a page, the server sends a text message to a cell phone, or the server sends an email containing the original message. The network administrator deals with these types of actions frequently in order to monitor the activities on the network, for example, when the server is not operational, the intermediary device informs the administrator that there is some type of failure, such as a hard drive failure or other causes.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram illustrating a conventional flow of communicating a web browser request in a network. In these web-browsing transactions, a web browser 10 (also referred to as an “administrator's web browser”) sends requests at sequence 1a through an intermediate intermediary device 12 (also referred to as a “proxy device”), which in turn generates server-side requests at sequence 2a on the web browser's behalf to the Internet 14. The server's response at sequence 3a is then passed back from the Internet 14 to the intermediary device 12 as appropriate in a client-side response at sequence 4a to the web browser 10.
As an Internet gateway security proxy, the intermediary device 12 is in the flow of all HTTP/HTTPS (commonly known as “web”) traffic and can apply user-level access controls based on authentications. By collecting the administrator's network username, dynamic policy can be configured to return status information and other device notifications in place of the requested web content. These notifications should be returned only when the request is identified as originating from the administrator (via authentication) and is a true web-browsing event (excluding non-browser applications or non-web page transactions). In addition to the notification text/data, the returned page should include a link to proceed to the originally requested page so that browsing is not interrupted.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide a method and device that provides an alternate notification messaging channel to an administrator via his/her normal web-browsing activities.